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articles
1. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Paul Ott Ecological Freedom: Aldo Leopold and the Human Ecological Relation
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This article develops the idea of ‘ecological freedom’ from Aldo Leopold’s account of ecological relations in terms of the dual notions of the “freedom from want and fear” and the “freedom to make mistakes.” Through an analysis of Leopold’s thought on technology and civilization, I develop and argue for the claim that direct experience of ecological relations, or ecological freedom, is vital to meaningful human life. The absence of ecological freedom constitutes a form of ecological alienation, which is paired with social alienation. Ecological freedom is then used as a way to understand environmental injustice and critique contemporary environmentalism.
2. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Tim Corballis Populating the Climate: Narrative In and With Climate Models
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This paper asks whether one way to link abstract scientific knowledge about the climate to the everyday imagination might be to think of climate modelling as a narrative practice. To do so, I draw on philosophical insights about narrative in scientific modelling from Norton Wise and Mary Morgan, to show that models can be deployed narratively, and that their outputs take a followable, embodied narrative form. This suggests that climate models might be deployed in an everyday storytelling practice evoking storyworlds with palpable meteorological actants.
3. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Marjolein Oele E-Co-Affectivity Beyond the Anthropocene: Rethinking the Role of Soil to Imagine a New “Us”
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Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing so, cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation.
4. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Katharine Loevy The Ikhwan al-Safa’’s Animal Accusers:: An Islamic Debate On Animal Slavery
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In the tenth-century Iraqi fable, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, the animals take the human beings to court for mistreatment. The humans ultimately win the case, but not without the animals presenting a series of arguments that continue to resonate despite the ending of the trial. The following essay provides an analysis of a number of these arguments insofar as they contest human abuses of animals within the context of enslavement. It offers evidence on both philosophical and historical grounds for why we need to rethink the received interpretation of the fable’s controversial ending.
5. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Kalpita Bhar Paul A Heideggerian Perspective on Thinking about Water: Revisiting the Transition from Hydrology to Hydrosocial Nexus
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It is said that the transition from hydrology to the hydrosocial system has the potential for transforming the way currently water is seen as a natural object. The hydrosocial cycle denotes that we need to think about water beyond the definition of natural objects as the meaning of water emerges from the socio-cultural-political nexus it is embedded in. In this essay by drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, I explore whether this transition is capable of changing the way we think about water. To philosophically capture the status of water and the thinking that is associated with it in this transitional moment, I engage with the notion of inceptual thinking, examining its possibilities within the context of this transition. My deliberation will establish that even though the hydrosocial cycle provides us with a unique space and opportunity from which to initiate inceptual thinking about water, the present orientation of hydrosocial scholarship fails to accomplish this objective. I further argue that the possibility to initiate an inceptual thinking arises from the rupture in our thinking, and our empathy toward the ‘in-between’ space of the actor and the thing. This inceptual thinking would lead toward understanding thing as gathering.
6. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Lauri Lahikainen, Tero Toivanen Working the Biosphere: Towards an Environmental Philosophy of Work
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Humans have arguably become a geological force that is changing the planet in profound and catastrophic ways. But what are the human practices that have such force? In this paper, we argue that work is exactly such a practice and that it is as workers that many of us are agents of global environmental change. When carbon dioxide is emitted or forests are cut down, someone is working. Yet we lack adequate descriptive and normative theories of work to understand how we are a geological force. In this paper, we suggest possible beginnings for an environmental philosophy of work.
7. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Gerard Kuperus Listening to the Salmon: Latour’s Gaia, Aboriginal Thinking, and the Earth Community
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When salmon disappear, their loss is felt among many species of animals, trees, and plants. This essay suggests listening to the salmon when it comes to learning how to become better members of the earth community, so that not our presence, but our absence would be a loss to the ecosystems that we dwell in. This argument is made through a discussion of Latour’s Facing Gaia and the Native American philosophy of the Tlingit. Albeit in different terms, both suggest ways to become better participants in a greater unity.
book reviews
8. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Marjolein Oele, Lincoln Stefanello David Wood. Deep Time, Dark Times: On Being Geologically Human
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9. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Amanda Parris Joanna Zylinska. The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse
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10. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Brett Crawford Michael Marder. Heidegger: Phenomenology, Ecology, Politics
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11. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Bernice Bovenkerk Strachan Donnelley. Frog Pond Philosophy: Essays on the Relationship Humans and Nature. Edited by Ceara Donnelley and Bruce Jennings
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12. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Ryan van Nood Susan L. Dunston. Emerson and Environmental Ethics
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13. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 2
Kelly Shepherd Eva Maria Räpple. The Environmental Crisis and Art: Thoughtlessness, Responsibility, and Imagination
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articles
14. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
David Baumeister Introduction to Special Issue: Reading Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign
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15. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Geoffrey Bennington Beastly Sovereignty: Three Unequal Footnotes to Derrida
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This article examines three textual moments that might plausibly have found their way into Derrida’s late Beast and Sovereign seminars, but that Derrida appears to avoid or overlook. Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics of the “One Best Man” scenario is placed in the context of his earlier characterizations of the naturally apolitical man as akin either to a beast or to a god; Bataille’s late descriptions of sovereignty as a kind of self-perverting hyperbolic structure are juxtaposed with some of Derrida’s own formulations about sovereign autoimmunity; Heidegger’s discussion, in a seminar nominally about Hölderlin, of a striking formula from Sophocles (hupsipolis apolis) is shown to capture something of the “outlaw” status of the sovereign as Derrida describes it.
16. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Kelly Oliver On Sharing a World with Other Animals
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Challenging Heidegger’s thesis that animals are poor in world while humans are world-building, in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, Jacques Derrida claims that each singular living being inhabits its own solitary world, its own desert island. There, he claims both, on the one hand, that animals share our world and may be world-building and, on the other, that we cannot be certain that human beings share a world or are world-building (at least not in Heidegger’s sense as set apart from animals). In this article, I trace the ethical implications of Derrida’s seemingly contradictory claims that we both share a world, and that each singular being, like an island, is a world unto itself.
17. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Annabelle Dufourcq Who/What is Bête? From an Uncanny Word to an Interanimal Ethics
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The deconstruction of stupidity [in French bêtise] plays a crucial role in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign. Through the concept of stupidity/bêtise the violence of our relationship with others, as inseparable from our relation to animality comes into view. “Stupidity” is deeply political, but also directly connected to the trace and, thus, cannot be simply overcome. While Sartre claimed that there are no fools, but just wicked men, Derrida embraces an uncanny version of stupidity. In this paper, guided by Derrida’s reflections, we will examine the many paradoxes that undermine the pseudo-concept of stupidity, as well as several key moments of its history in Schelling’s, Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s, and Deleuze’s philosophies. Eventually our purpose will be to display the ethical statements which can be extrapolated from Derrida’s perspective: when the world is gone, how can we carry stupidity?
18. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Kalpana Seshadri Hyperbole and Ellipses: Derrida and Agamben on Sovereignty and Life
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The essay argues for a nuanced understanding of the notorious dissonance between Derrida and Agamben despite their shared interest in troubling the metaphysical separation between human and animal. I argue that a close scrutiny of their differing strategies towards the matrix of framing issues (such as sovereignty and violence) is salient for keeping the ontological question of species difference open. I suggest that the dissonance between the two thinkers is best understood in relation to systemic and rhetorical effects—namely, the encompassing figure of the circle that structures sovereignty, and the rhetoric of hyperbole that disfigures the circle into an ellipse and the line. This ironic interplay appears through their mutually dissonant readings of the localization of life (human and animal) and the situation of power and violence in relation to sovereignty.
19. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
Rebekah Sinclair And Say the Animal Resisted? Derrida, Biopolitics, and the Problem with Species
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My article does two things: 1) tracks Derrida’s claim that biopolitical and sovereign power use species taxonomies to performatively depoliticize and ignore the reciprocity of creaturely perspectives; and 2) argues Derrida makes possible a deconstruction of species, and demonstrates its necessity for better political futures. To do this, I follow Derrida’s criticism of autopsic logics and the circularity of metaphysics and zoology, and his affirmation of embodied singularity. Finally, I start and end with analyses of cetacean suicide: by privileging how others see themselves and us over our perspective of them, Derrida challenges what counts as political and who decides.
20. Environmental Philosophy: Volume > 16 > Issue: 1
John Llewelyn Singularisability, Plurality, and Community
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The chief aim of this essay is to draw attention to how in Derrida’s last seminars the hyphenation “life-death” serves as a key to understanding the force of the hyphenation in the expression “animal-human” and how the work of sharing which it stands for there differs from the exclusively separative work for which we might employ the oblique stroke or slash, as in “animal/human” and “life/death.” If we wonder whether and how the hyphen and the oblique stroke share each other’s company, it might occur to us that a name for this relation of sharing could be John Duns Scotus’s distinctio formalis understood in the light of his haecceitas respelled as ecce-itas by Gerald Manley Hopkins.